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• 1 2021-04-19T17:04:20+00:00 Emblems in Early Modern Nürnberg 1 image_header 2021-04-19T17:04:20+00:00 Rem's book describes the decorative program in the Großer Saal [Great Hall] in the Altes Rathaus [Old Town Hall] of Nürnberg, while discussions of other significant monuments of civic art are included as well. First built in 1332–1340, the Old Town Hall underwent extensive renovation and expansion beginning in 1521, including the commission of allegorical decorations designed by Willibald Pirckheimer (1470–1530) and Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). The Great Hall boasted the most sophisticated wall and ceiling decorations in the whole of Europe, which were only later surpassed by those in the Sistine Chapel. Its allegorical centerpiece was the Triumphal Chariot of Emperor Maximilian, a painting covering the entire north wall of the Great Hall. When the space was renovated again beginning in 1613, a series of thirty-two emblems was painted into the window niches opposite the portrayal of the imperial triumphal chariot, augmenting Pirckheimer and Dürer’s existing allegorical program with a new genre, which offered modern expressions of good government and social justice in compact form. The emblematic epigrams were written by the Augsburg patrician Georg Rem (Remus) and soon thereafter, in 1617, they were engraved and published as Emblemata Politica by Peter Isselburg (1580–1630). In the introduction to the printed book, Isselburg writes that he had been so inspired by the political emblems in the Great Hall that he had immediately engraved and published them to make their civic message available to a wider audience (Isselburg and Rem[us], sig. A2B–A3A).
  
  Published in book form, however, the emblems from the Great Hall were divorced from their context. Clearly, Georg Rem understood that this two-dimensional expression diminished his work and deprived it of its rich contextualization within Pirckheimer and Dürer’s sophisticated decorative program. The Rem manuscript preserved today at the Newberry Library represents an attempt to rectify this situation by positioning the emblems within the greater rhetorical framework of the decorative program and extending the interpretive framework to include civic monuments in Nürnberg from the previous century. Moreover, the manuscript confirms that Rem saw his emblems in a much wider context than that of the Great Hall. He consciously places his emblems in a century-old tradition of articulating both real and ideal concepts of justice and good government in the relations between the empire and the Free Imperial City of Nürnberg.